With the ever-increasing convergence of fixed and mobile networks, and the rapid development of wireless access techniques and user devices, Internet applications are steadily moving to wireless communications systems and are frequently accessed through mobile nodes. Although the advanced physical layer technologies have enhanced the capacity and reliability of wireless networks, the service delivery latency in wireless networks often remains too high.
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the de facto standard for Internet-based commercial communication networks. TCP, however, generally cannot differentiate packet loss caused by congestion or wireless interference. The associated service delivery latency generally is too high to satisfy the users' expectations when using mobile nodes. Taking the web service as an example, users generally expect a page to be loaded in less than two seconds, and 40% users waits for no more than 3 seconds before leaving the web sites. Therefore, high network latency hinders the further development of wireless networks.